Eyes darting as they look for easy prey, office sharks are always circling, or sending their minions out to do their reconnaissance or groundwork. The minions diligently do as they are told, out of fear or to earn brownie (or brown-nosing) points and their place on the team. Corporate culture can be brutal, with office politics undermining personal development in the interests of personal Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets that will enhance the bottom line of the business, or personal ambitions motivated by an increase in the individual income of co-workers. It's all about the money, honey.
Within this tough environment, people are hurting, with the additional pressure of fear that any sign of vulnerability could be an invitation to attack- an opportunity for someone to stand on them to scale higher heights, amongst the individual members of a team, or between teams. The many platitudes delivered in the form of memes like “tough times don’t last, tough people do” do little more than entrench the predatory culture in a sea of hidden desperation.
Looking out on the sea on a clear day, it's difficult not to be magnetically attracted to the blue waters with distant white wave crests. Like a corporation with its careful attention to branding and perception management, the waves don't seem dangerous from afar, and the veneer, as beautiful as a seascape is, hides whatever may be lurking beneath. What you see isn’t always what you get.
Toxic workplaces don't always look like a scene from "The Wolf Of Wall Street" from the outside, or by glancing around during the interview process. Bearing in mind that sharks are renowned for their stealth, they also have the patience to wait for a while and circle with that ubiquitous evil grin to create fear in their victims before they go in for the kill. Sometimes, the fear alone can cause the victims to make enough mistakes to implode, sometimes, a bite or two are necessary.
Spot A Toxic Workplace From The Outside
Considering whether a prospective job is a dream job or an invitation to a toxic environment is tricky, there are a few ways to gauge an employer:
Use the Interview: Scrutinize them while they scrutinize you: When you prepare questions for your interview, include questions about staff turnover and employee wellness programs that may be on offer scattered randomly during the interview. You could even politely ask what the ethos of the company is.
Did anyone smile at you?: People who are happy in their environment tend to be more at ease, and more open to a polite and friendly greeting. If everyone tries to look busy and avoids even looking your way, it's a red flag. Most people don't look to make lifelong friends at work, but a friendly demeanor is a reliable indication of how comfortable people feel in their environment. If everyone is scowling, run- or start from your first day knowing it's a stepping stone or simply something to pay the rent while you're looking for something better. As soon as possible, establish boundaries to prevent the negativity from seeping into your psyche.
Online reviews: Sites like Glassdoor will give some indication of the environment, but reviews can be bought, or employees with sour grapes can skew the ratings. Use reviews judiciously.
Ask around: Often friends of friends have inside information. A few feelers can deliver useful information.
Trust your instincts: If something feels off, it probably is. Either do further research or look elsewhere.
Unfortunately, a healthy/toxic workplace often isn’t as high a priority as salary, perks, and advancement opportunities. Given the amount of time spent at work, it’s worth taking time to understand that you may be swimming into a sea of sharks. Make sure your cage is strong, or learn how to adjust before you dive in.
Spot A Toxic Workplace From The Inside
Certain indicators are prevalent in the modern workplace that drive the business towards success. A workforce driven to succeed is one of these. They're necessary for the company to succeed and the employees to retain their jobs, but there's a distinct line between driving with force and using strategies that don't destroy the very people who are pulling the cart.
Meme about horses with many drivers
Productivity is beneficial to any organization but this requires that employees and engaged. Counterintuitively, disengaged employees were found to be in the majority by a recent Gallup poll. This showed up as:
Role confusion and dysfunction. ...
Chronic and excessive stress. ...
Pervasive office gossip. ...
High turnover rates.
The other indicators that lend themselves to a toxic work environment are :
The Peter Principle: When people are promoted to their lowest level of incompetence, it results in senior positions being occupied by people who shouldn’t be there, creating frustrations downstream and impeding reaching goals.
Office Politics: Good politicking- fairly promoting yourself as you network and engage in stakeholder management, is a good thing and should be encouraged. It’s when people seek advantage at the expense of others or the greater good that relationships and the environment are adversely affected.
Surviving in a toxic workplace takes enormous amounts of energy that would be better directed to actually doing work, making the workplace more productive.
A better question would be "How to thrive in a toxic workplace." It's possible if you consider that grass grows better when it gets manure dumped on it. But to survive in a toxic workplace takes specific strategies which could include some deep lessons from the deep sea.
There are many different fish in the sea- not just sharks. Some of their survival strategies in a toxic environment are emulated in the ocean such as:
Spongebob Squarepants: Arguably, the humble sea sponge- immortalized as Spongebob in the cartoon series, is the most famous sea dweller. There are many Bob’s in offices around the world too. They simply absorb all the negativity around them and adopt a perennially happy face and eternally optimistic attitude. Sometimes it works for Spongebob. For Office Bob, the negativity is often later dumped on someone when they get home or is numbed by unhealthy practices and addictions. Or worse, it builds up until it explodes at inappropriate moments. But carnivorous sponges can catch live food, rather than just eat whatever happens to drop by, a somewhat less passive approach.
The Office Crab: Simply being grumpy and unapproachable by disappearing under a hard shell, and eating the sponge also happens to be 100% normal crab behavior. The reality is that they do just about anything with the sponge, like climb over it, eat it, destroy it, or push it around.
Squidward Strategies: Spongebob naively believes that this squid, Tentacles, (and everyone else) enjoys his company even though the squid clearly harbors a rather intense dislike for the sponge. Perhaps, like Squidward, discretion could work by just gritting your teeth to get through the day.
The Delightful Dolphin: Intelligent, sociable, and many sharks are scared of dolphins- what’s not to like? There is that small matter of the dolphins eating the other fish- including squid and jellyfish. As well-loved as they are, the dolphins also have a few skeletons. It’s how they survive.
Swimming with Sharks: Eating mainly crustaceans, fish, seals, birds, squid, turtles, sea snakes, and even smaller sharks, dolphins are also sometimes on the shark menu. Some sea-dwellers simply take the approach that if you can’t beat them, join them, and swim with the sharks in a symbiotic relationship. It works in the sea, but in an office, it’s a divisive and debilitating tactic that leaves the parasites exposed when the sharks swim off to bluer waters.
The Obdurate Orcas: Top of the food chain in the ocean, the Orca is a magnificent being. Occasionally, orcas may interact with humans, dumbing themselves down to our level as they try to interact with the one species that seems to misinterpret the natural order- humankind. Very few orca attacks on humans are recorded. Limited to circumstances where they have been kept captive or are severely threatened, the killer whale (another name for the orca) comes out to show where its name comes from.
While these strategies may work in the ocean, we live on dry land and pretend to be the smartest species. Kill or be killed became obsolete after the Stoneage but despite massive progress in recognizing human rights, too many people are unable to see life in any other way.
There’s plenty of fish in the sea and a place in the sun for everyone. To survive, find yours, preferably without killing someone to get it or keep it. Then find ways to dodge the toxic types.
2,600 workers across America were interviewed in a recent FlexJobs survey. 42% of the participants said they were seriously considering quitting their jobs, and 20% said they had recently quit. The number 3 reason for quitting was given as a toxic workplace culture. Quitting it seems, is seen as one of the ways to avoid toxic people.
In his article, 10 Toxic People You Should Avoid Like The Plague, Dr Travis Bradbury, author of Emotional Intelligence Habits, indicates that the toxic people to avoid are:
1. The Gossip: Instead of learning from interesting people, gossipers get pleasure from other's misfortune and tire you out by having to listen to their salacious tales.
“Great minds discuss ideas, average ones discuss events, and small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
2. The Temperamental: Projecting their feelings onto you, temperamental people are difficult to dump because we tend to feel sorry for them. Dr Bradbury's good advice is to avoid them at all costs- they will only use you as their emotional toilet.
3. The Victim: Hard to identify by people who have a normal or pronounced level of empathy, their time of need is pretty much all the time. The saying “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional” captures the toxicity of the victim, who chooses to suffer over and over.
4. The Self-Absorbed: If you feel alone hanging out around a self-absorbed person, it’s because they have no real connection with other people. Others, in their eyes, are only there to be used to build their own self-esteem.
5. The Envious: By not getting satisfaction from someone else’s happiness, they are also unable to get satisfaction from within themselves. It’s dangerous to spend time with a self-absorbed person- they teach you to trivialize your own accomplishments.
6. The Manipulator: Sucking energy while they treat you like a friend, manipulators always want something from you. It’s all take, no give.
7. The Dementor: a character from J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, Dementors are evil creatures that suck people’s souls out of their bodies. They are those people who have the innate ability to walk into a room and instantly suck the life out of it. Their negativity will rub off on your thinking.
8. The Twisted: With bad intentions, twisted types derive deep satisfaction from the pain and misery of others. They only want to hurt you, make you feel bad, or get something from you. The only good thing is that they are easy to spot and then dump, quickly.
9. The Judgmental: Kind of like the cool police, they look down on everyone because only their way is right. They will stifle you and make the thing you’re most passionate about something you feel terrible about.
10. The Arrogant: While arrogance is a false sense of confidence that masks insecurities, arrogant people are often low performers and disagreeable, and tend to have more cognitive problems than the average person.
The best way to protect yourself is to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. But that's not always possible or practical. A better way is to create definite boundaries, focus on your tasks and goals, and keep any interaction to the absolute minimum. You are not at work to make friends or to solve everyone else's personal issues, so limiting conversations to necessary work-related communication, in writing where possible, is a good way to protect yourself.
The 2023 Work in America workforce survey by the American Psychological Association revealed that 22% of employees said their work environment has “harmed their mental health.” This has been long recognized by researchers. Repetitive stress from abuse in the workplace could even lead to physical health issues like heart disease and cancer.
Perhaps it may be time to consider a new strategy at work to thrive. The orcas have a strange ritual to deal with those they see as toxic. Researchers find that they are ruthless when it comes to killing sharks, making surgical-like incisions in the sharks' belly and removing only the liver. It is an unexplained behavior and while trying to remove a colleague's liver is not suggested under any circumstances- and would lead to incarceration, perhaps the metaphor is appropriate.
By removing the liver- the organ that processes what is ingested and then releases toxins as turds, the orca's may be simply leaving the sharks to drown in their own shit. It’s a whole lot easier- and less criminal, to simply walk away and leave toxic people similarly drowning in their own toxins.
In a place where negativity prevails, employees find themselves in a hostile environment where noxious behavior is prevalent. Bullying, manipulating, shouting, telling tales, and people belittling others are all examples of toxic behavior in the workplace. The antagonism is almost palpable and negative behaviors are baked into the culture.
Signs that you work in a toxic environment
Lack of trust: Micromanagement looms large in a toxic workplace.
Low morale and negativity
High turnover rates
Role confusion: No clear goals or roles = dysfunction. This leads to conflict and no job satisfaction can be attained because goals aren’t definite.
Unhealthy work boundaries
Excessive stress: Burnout is common in a toxic environment, as are frequent disagreements and a pervasive fear of failure. The resulting stress can lead to health problems or even leave workers with the symptoms of PTSD from the trauma inflicted by the toxic environment.
Gaslighting: Examples of gaslighting include being excluded from meeting about you or hearing gossip from a third party.
A fish, they say, rots from the head. Are you running a glorified gauntlet, where the golden handcuffs replace the sharp teeth that claw into innocent passers-by? Or are you just trying to escape that fate? Both sides would do well to remember that the people on the other side are just that: people.
Everybody is fighting their own battle.
The problem is that their pain spills onto the workplace battlefield.
An article in the MIT Sloan Management Review looked at research on toxicity in the workplace, which shows the three critical drivers companies should focus on are:
Leadership.
Social norms.
Work design.
Pioneer of the study of corporate culture, Ed Schein said: "The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture." The review urges top leaders to commit to and sustain focus on cultural detox.”
Schein says the CEO is the single most important factor in setting the corporate culture. Without a commitment from the top team, any organization-wide culture change is destined to fail. A holistic approach is suggested that incorporates multiple interventions and a sustained focus over time.
Instead of losing the war for talent, leaders can detox their corporate culture. Creating a healthy work environment- one that respects the dignity of all employees, provides benefits on all sides. Recognizing people as flesh and blood beings, who carry their unique burdens, goes a long way towards creating synergy between team members. Teaching sharks that "Fish are friends, not food," as Bruce the shark said in the movie Finding Nemo at their rehab meeting, can help clear the deck for a better understanding between co-workers and management. And there's less bloodshed in a productive healthy working environment.
Given the amount of time spent in employment, the time is surely better spent in a meaningful way, and adding meaning to the lives of others is perhaps one of the most meaningful ways that humans can regard themselves as being at least as good as if not better than, the beasts. Except perhaps the orcas.
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